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SIGs/Minimal Core/Packages in the @core Group

From FedoraProject

This page documents the packages in the current @core group in Fedora's comps file. It is not the source of the comps file, nor is it authorative. It exists primarily to document the historical decisions which led to this selection of packages.

Mandatory Packages

These packages are always installed and can't be removed by deselecting them with a -packagename in kickstart. Some of them may be removable with rpm -e (if not required by something else, of course).

audit

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

basesystem

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

bash

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

biosdevname

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

coreutils

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

cronie

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

curl

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

dhclient

Description: DHCP client daemon and dhclient-script

Needed because: For dynamic addressing. Should be made non-mandatory for kickstarts for statically-addressed systems.

Other notes:

e2fsprogs

Description: Utilities for managing ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems

Needed because: Contains e2fsck. Maybe should be made default instead of mandatory, in case entirely other filesystems are used.

Other notes: This is a "leaf" package in core; nothing else pulls it in

filesystem

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

glibc

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

hostname

Description: Show or set the system's host name

Needed because: Used by the traditional initscripts to do just that.

Other notes: It's still a dependency of the packages that require it; it may not need to be explicitly listed.

initscripts

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

iproute

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

iprutils

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

iputils

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

kbd

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

less

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

man-db

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

ncurses

Description: Utilities for the console control library

Needed because: This contains the `clear` command.

Other notes: Not to be confused with ncurses-libs, the library itself

openssh-clients

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:scpin to the system won't work unless this is installed.

openssh-server

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

parted

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

passwd

Description: The command-line utility for changing passwords

Needed because: Not technically needed, especially for systems which use external auth or all keys. Could be set to "default" instead of "mandatory"

Other notes:

plymouth

Description: Graphical boot animation

Needed because: Previously was the only way to prompt for disk encryption passwords on boot; no longer necessary due to systemd.

Other notes: A good candidate for removal.

policycoreutils

Description: contains the policy core utilities that are required for basic operation of a SELinux system.

Needed because:

Other notes:

procps-ng

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

rootfiles

Description: shell dotfiles for the root account

Needed because: The main purpose of this seems to be to set aliases to force rm, cp, and mv to prompt on overwrite.

Other notes: This is a really, really tiny package.

rpm

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

rsyslog

Description: System logging and kernel message trapping daemon

Needed because: With systemd's new journal feature, it's not technically needed; the author of systemd has suggested that a feature to make the journal the default for F19 (but this has not yet been officially proposed, let alone accepted)

Other notes: Even if systemd journal isn't the default, it may make sense to make this non-mandatory.

selinux-policy-targeted

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

setup

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

shadow-utils

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

sudo

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

systemd

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

util-linux

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

vim-minimal

Description: A minimal version of the VIM editor

Needed because: It would be very frustrating to not have an editor if, for example, the system came up without networking functioning and needed an adjustment.

Other notes: Editor wars aside, this is the basic traditional text editor.

yum

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

Default Packages

These packages are installed by default and can't be deselected in the Anaconda UI but can be deselected with -packagename in a kickstart file.

NetworkManager

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

ppc64-utils

Description:

Needed because:

Other notes:

sendmail

Description: Mail Transport Agent (MTA )

Needed because: Probably not technically needed, although cronie defaults to sending e-mail on errors. This is here because we have multiple packages providing MTAs and we wanted a deterministic result.

Other notes:

Packages No Longer in @Core

Packages here were previously in @core, but have been removed. This is not a comprehensive list back to the dawn of Fedora, but will serve to provide history for some of our decisions.